This invention pertains to the art of baking buns and in particular relates to buns which are intended to be filled with liquified foods and sauces and held in the hand for eating.
Hot dogs, hamburgers, and other hand-held foods are familiar items. Lately, extension and further development in the art of preparing such foods has been taking place. For example, one now sees barbecued beef sandwiches which resemble hamburgers and chili dogs which resemble hot dogs. Items such as these incorporate a certain amount of solid food with a sauce. Anyone who has eaten them may well recall that the sauce causes certain problems. For one thing, it tends to flow out of the sandwich and onto the person's hand as he is eating. Also, the sauce tends to saturate the roll and make it rather soggy before the article can be completely consumed. Thus, it would be highly desirable if a bun could be baked so that it would hold sauces and other like liquids without permitting them to easily flow out of the bun and onto the person's hand, and if the bun itself would not saturate for a relatively longer period of time than is now the case.
Some prior schemes and devices seem to have been made with a view toward accommodating the insertion of foods. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,330,410 to R. E. Cyr shows an apparatus for making hot dog rolls having a channel to accommodate the hot dog. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 3,385,205 to C. V. McCloud concerns itself with the shape of a bun being baked for reception of meat such as weiners and other foods and fillers. But to the best of my knowledge, neither these presents nor any other prior art article, apparatus or method concern themselves with the problems of saturation and food outflow discussed above.
It is, therefore, an object of this invention to provide a bun having a sufficiently thick and hard crusted interior channel to prevent the bun's being saturated when filled with partially creamed foods or foods suspended in sauce.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a bun having a channel therein with transverse ribs so as to help retain such types of food therein as the bun is consumed.
It is a further object of this invention to provide an apparatus for baking the bun having the above features.
Finally, it is an object of this invention to provide a method for baking buns having the above features.
The objects of this invention are accomplished through the use of a baking utensil having a channel-forming surface therein and by applying relatively more heat to the channel-forming surface than is applied to the other parts of the utensil.
Also, means are provided for insuring that the dough being baked is held in close contact with the channel-forming surface.